Sir Vidia becomes a Nobelman

His outbursts against Indians shouldn’t deflect attention from his writings on the country

N Chandra Mohan

There is a clear and present danger that critical assessments of V S Naipaul’s literary work will be overshadowed by his recent acerbic outbursts. Shortly after he dedicated his Nobel prize for literature to India, the home of his ancestors, he condescendingly observed that Indians didn’t have much of an intellectual life earlier, although matters have improved since then and his works have been better appreciated.

“Forty years ago, in India people were living in ritual. This is one of the things I have helped India with”, stated Naipaul. “The trouble with people like me writing about societies where there is no intellectual life is that if you write about it, people are angry. If they read the book, which in most cases they don’t, they want approval. Now India has improved, the books have been accepted”, he added.
Such statements have occasioned angry editorials that Indians have been somewhat hasty in claiming Naipaul as one of their own. This is unfortunate as his India writings deserve to be seriously read: An area of darkness (1964), India: a wounded civilisation (1977) and India: a million mutinies now (1990). Each of these holds a clear mirror to the complex and variegated phases of India in transition.
Naipaul kept returning to the country since his first visit 39 years ago and his views on India matured over time — which is contrary to the popular view that his writings were only critical. “India had not worked its magic on me. It remained the land of my childhood, an area of darkness”, stated Naipaul earlier. But a return journey 27 years later succeeded in “abolishing the darkness that separated me from my ancestral past.” The two quotes are from An area of darkness and India: a million mutinies now. The title of the first novel itself was sufficiently evocative enough for many to rush to a premature judgment without reading it. An area of darkness is excellent travel writing and social observation from a descendant of 19th century indentured Indians who was visiting the country for the first time.

Naipaul had contending visions of India when he arrived, neither of which proved to be a reliable guide to understanding the country. The first was about the kind of poverty-stricken country from which his ancestors hailed — “a most fearful place”. The second India was the country of the freedom movement and great names like Gandhi and Nehru. The second vision didn’t quite balance the poverty and abjectness that he found on Indian streets and in the countryside.
India’s poverty triggered all the insecurities that he felt as a child of an immigrant family which struggled during the Great Depression era in Trinidad. “Two generations separated me from that kind of poverty, but I felt closer to it than most of the Indians I met”, argued Naipaul in India: a million mutinies now. This accounts for the extended treatment of India’s poverty in An area of darkness.

Naipaul’s views slightly changed when he wrote India: a wounded civilisation. True, he worried that India’s poverty was deified, romanticised and made holy, thanks to Gandhianism. But there were changes with five-year plans. India industrialised and doubled its food production. “And out of this prodigious effort arose a new mutinous stirring, which took India by surprise, and with which it didn’t know how to cope.”

This became a full-blown statement in India:a million mutinies now. The author admits that he hadn’t quite understood the extent to which India was remade or restored to itself. That this process during the 20th century had taken time. That the freedom movement reflected all of this and turned out to be the “truest kind of liberation”. That people everywhere had ideas as to who they were and what they owed themselves.

According to Naipaul, this may have been hidden in 1962 but became clearer since then: “The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million mutinies,” he writes in India:a million mutinies now.

What are these mutinies? In post independence India, the process of development freed up new particularities and identities of caste, clan and region. These mutinies were supported by group excess, sectarian excess, religious excess, regional excess. According to him, “what the mutinies were also helping to define was the strength of general intellectual life, and the wholeness and humanism of the values to which all Indians now felt they could appeal. And - strange irony - the mutinies were not be wished away. They were part of the new way for many millions, part of India’s growth, part of its restoration.”

This is as insightful as it can get, but there is a big danger that the author’s matured views of his India writings will get disregarded because of his recent statements against Indians. At a different level, critics of Naipaul credit his success to his post-September 11 outbursts against Islam. But that would be downright unfair to the author, whose prodigious literary output is deserving enough for any prestigious prize. Nevertheless, it’s interesting that Swedish officials administering the Nobel prizes did concede that Naipaul might be a political winner.

Through a blaze of controversy Sir Vidia thus has become a Nobelman. He has joined the ranks of Rabindranath Tagore, Gabriela Mistral, Miguel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, Octavio Paz, Nadine Gordimer and Derek Walcott who have secured perhaps the most coveted prize for literature. It is sad but true that only a handful of such writers from South Asian, Latin American, Caribbean and African countries have figured in the 100-year history of the Nobel prize for literature. Obviously, politics has played a role in the selection, but that shouldn’t deflect attention away from Naipaul’s writings.